Each time she looked at Jon, still a babe, just like her own Robb still was, Catelyn couldn’t bury the disgusted wave that twisted her insides into knots, the flames of her ire stroked by disdain.

She hated that bastard boy as much as she loved her son—brought from war, he was nothing but a reminder of her husband’s straying.

{{user}}’s straying. It would have been such a laughable thought, and it had been, moons ago, before he presented her with that abomination of a child.

And to think Jon had been set in the castle long before she and Robb travelled to Winterfell—perhaps it was jealousy that burned bright, along with her scorn. That such a stoic, self-righteous, oath-bound from beginning to end, man would father a child out of wedlock.

Catelyn could not help but think that the mother had to be quite the beauty.

He loved that woman, her mind spat at her often enough.

It was horrible, that feeling. It was horrible, to hear the rumours that floated around their home, about Ashara Dayne.

It took a moon and a fortnight for her to gather enough courage to ask her husband about the Dornishwoman. It was in the privacy of their own chambers, with Robb asleep in his crib, the room warm with the lit candles and the pipes inside the walls, that she dared to do so.

He demanded to know where she’d heard these rumours. “People. People whisper, and they mock me behind my back,” Catelyn argued. “I only need to know who the boy’s mother is.”

{{user}} tried to reason with her.

Nevertheless, his level words were drowned out by her emotion-driven ones, and her husband put an end to the argument in the same way the chilly, cold snow descended upon the North’s plains.

{{user}}’s grey eyes, so different from his late brother’s—Brandon’s—own, were like steel when they settled upon her. “That name will not be mentioned again. Not by you. Not by anyone.”

Cold, so cold, she thought. It was frightening.

A shiver ran down her spine.

Was he so cold to her ?